Page 40 of A Delicate Deception
She was silent for a few seconds, and he thought he might have gone too far. Then she fanned out her cards in front of her, facedown. “Tell me more.”
He let out a long breath, glad for a chance to properly apologize. “One of the stupider things I’ve done in my life was to assume the worst of you that first day you came to Pelham Hall. I can think of a dozen ways I could have put you at ease, and I utterly failed as a friend by not doing so. And then I compounded that by insulting you. Under the circumstances it’s remarkable that you’ll still talk to me at all. I can only assume that you do this so that Lex isn’t left with nobody but me as company, which is very admirable of you.”
She stared at him, her gray eyes wide. “I’ll disregard the second half of that, because it’s too stupid to deserve a reply. I meant tell me more about how you wish you could touch me.”
He could do that. He could do that for hours. He scrubbed a hand along the back of his neck. “When we were together,” he whispered, “I wish I had taken more time. I wish I had seen all of you, touched all of you, tasted all of you. And I didn’t, because I’m an idiot, and that’s something I’m going to be reminded of every time I see you.”
“You’re assuming you won’t get another chance,” she said, doing something with the cards and helping herself to some more of Sydney’s farthings.
Sydney dropped his cards and she tutted over his lack of dexterity, but smiled at him over the top of the cards she had fanned out in her hand.
“You were serious,” she said. “You’re truly bad at cards.” For reasons she chose not to fully examine, his total lack of competence at something as basic asvingt-et-unendeared him to her. It was like finding a three-legged dog or a cat with one ear: one had to look after it. “You have no sense of strategy.” The utter guilelessness of this man both charmed Amelia and made her want to wrap him in a blanket and keep him safe. “I dare say that’s why you find it such a trial to talk with the railway backers,” she said. “They’re trying to negotiate with you, and you’re telling them what your best cards are.” She returned the various hairpins and cuff links that had served as stakes.
He frowned. “My brother used to handle that sort of thing. And now I make do the best I can, which I’m afraid isn’t very good at all.”
She knew the way guilt and grief could tangle together. There was nothing she could do about that. “Why railways?” she asked.
It took Sydney a moment to follow her meaning. “Why do I build railways? I want to make it easier for things and people to move around. Change is coming and we need to be ready for it. If we don’t get the railways laid properly now, we’ll be in a mad rush in a few years.”
“Why?” she persisted.
“Look.” He swept the cards aside and shook his remaining coins onto the table. “Here’s Portsmouth. Here’s Liverpool. Manchester.” He dropped a farthing piece in the middle. “That’s us.” And now a crown. “There’s France.” He hesitated a moment, then took out a guinea. “Here’s New York. Right now, in order to get a round of cheese from eastern France to here, it has to travel over bad roads, good roads, and canals before being loaded on a ship that sails to Liverpool. Then it has to travel overland to Manchester, and then from there to a cheesemonger in Bakewell.”
“There are no French cheeses to be had in Bakewell,” she pointed out. “Not for love or money.”
“But there would be if the roads were good, the ships faster, and the railways ever got built.”
“Seems a lot of bother just for cheese.”
He rested his forearms on the table, his head inches from hers. “Imagine that instead of cheese, it’s people that we’re moving about.” He gestured at their makeshift map. “Where are your mother and sisters? London?” He placed a penny on London. “And you’ve mentioned a brother, I believe?”
“Two brothers. Kent and Shropshire, respectively.”
He placed coins accordingly. “Anyone else?”
“A pair of friends not far from Worksop,” she said. He placed a coin a few miles to the east of where they were, near to Weybourne Priory, where Verity and Ash lived when they weren’t in London.
They both regarded the map. She knew the minute he saw the pattern, because his eyebrows rose and he looked hard at her, his dark eyes seeing things he wasn’t meant to. “You took a house in a place that was almost on the way to two of these places. Your brother”—he indicated Shropshire—“and friend”—he indicated Worksop—“are less than a day traveling post. And the roads from here to London are serviceable. You deliberately situated yourself where you’d be far enough away to be private, but not so far as to be remote. You know the value of roads, Amelia. Your people have the money to come see you and the education to write you letters. Not everybody has that.”
“And your railways would change that?”
“One day. That’s why it matters. The better we get at moving things about, the more we bridge the gap between people. Think of it. People will travel from one end of the nation to the other without stopping at inns. Friends will think nothing of a distance of hundreds of miles. Everything you think you know will change.”
She had meant to parlay his words into something intelligent he could say to investors or parliamentarians. But instead she was dazzled by this image of a future where she could just see people when she wanted and then promptly go home when she was done. “Why does it matter to you?” she asked. “To you in particular?”
“I’ve always been a tinkerer,” he said. “My brother and I built our first engine when I was sixteen. We got work with an engineering firm and then, a few years ago, we started our own firm. That’s how we came here. We were surveying the route for a potential tramway. One afternoon, as we were quarreling over whether the grade of an incline was too steep to work with, we came across Lex’s sister. She had turned her ankle, Andrew very gallantly carried her home, and within two months they were married. They said it was love at first sight, which I thought was the silliest rubbish until—” He broke off and looked at her, startled. For an instant she thought he’d try to backtrack, try to pretend he hadn’t suggested what she thought he had. But instead he let out a chagrined laugh. “Well, I suppose that wherever he is now, he’s feeling properly smug.”
“So,” she said, her mind reeling, “you build railways because you enjoy creating things?”
He spun a coin. “I’m an engineer because I like solving problems and making things work. But I build railways—or, God help me, I’m trying to—because I, well, I suppose that if people could move about more easily then I’d be less alone.” He swallowed. “Which I suppose is very silly because people would still have to actually want to see me.”
She was not going to cry. She had too much practice masking her feelings to shed a spontaneous tear. But Sydney looked like he could do with some air. “Step outside with me?” she asked, rising to her feet.
“Are you all right?” Sydney asked as he followed her onto the terrace.
“Yes, but you aren’t. How thick is your head not to understand that you have friends? Do you not see that the duke thinks the world of you?”
“That’s not friendship. It’s just lingering fondness for a former—” He broke off, eyes wide.
